By examining a very wide range of sworn
testimonies from voters, polling officials and others close to the
administration of the Nov. 2 election; by statistical analysis of the
certified vote by
mathematicians, election experts and independent research teams who
have conducted detailed studies of the results in Ohio, New Mexico,
Florida and elsewhere; from experts who studied the voting machines,
tabulators and
other electronic equipment on which a fair vote count has depended; and
from a team of attorneys and others who have challenged the Ohio
results; the freepress.org investigative team has compiled a portrait
of an
election whose true outcome must be investigated further by the
Congress, the media and all Americans -- because it was almost
certainly not an honest victory for George W. Bush.

Crucial flaws in the national vote count,
most importantly in Ohio, New Mexico and Florida, indicate John Kerry
was most likely the actual winner on November 2, as reported in
national exit polls.
At very least, the widespread tampering with how the election was
conducted, and how Ohio's votes were counted and re-counted, has
compromised this nation's historic commitment to free and fair
elections.

On Thursday, January 6, the Electoral College
will be challenged by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and other members of
Congress under a law passed in 1887 in reaction to the fraudulent
election of
1876. A fuller investigation requires assent by at least one Senator.

As this vote nears, Ohio’s certified
presidential vote (and quite likely those of at least Florida and New
Mexico) is simply not credible. George W. Bush’s ‘victory’ appears to
have
resulted from multiple frauds – a GOP ‘do-everything’ strategy to win
the state that swung the election.

In today's article, we list the top ten
glaring flaws in the Ohio vote that have allowed Bush to gather the
votes to ‘win’ the presidency in Ohio with an apparent margin of
118,775 votes - the
result from an official recount that manually examined only 3 percent
of ballots cast.

This list involves very large totals of
uncounted, tainted or fraudulent votes. Taken together, they exceed
Bush's margin of victory in Ohio.

These expert analyses are based on state and
local Board of Election statistics, U.S. Census reports, and other
public documents. They were not conducted with any assistance from John
F. Kerry’s
campaign. All the conclusions presented can be re-checked among the
wide range of documents posted at freepress.org under the Election 2004
department. The authors will also respond to specific journalistic
inquiries at
truth@freepress.org. Additional key sources are specified below.

These flaws involve very large numbers of
votes. But they cannot fully explain how the results were recorded on
Election Day for one crucial reason: the paper and digital record trail
needed to
analyze the actual voting has been sealed from public scrutiny by
Ohio’s Republican Secretary of State, Kenneth Blackwell, who both
administered the state's election and served as the co-chair of Ohio's
2004
Bush-Cheney campaign.

Blackwell and other Republican officials
continue to discount such criticisms. Blackwell has written that the
election ran "smoothly." His office has refused subpoenas requesting
him to
testify, terming them a form of "harassment." Ohio Republican Party
Chairman Robert Bennett has said that this year's election had "fewer
glitches" than previous ones. "We have bipartisan
(election" boards and very specific rules and procedures," he says. "To
have fraud within the counting process in Ohio, you would have to have
massive collusion."

Nearly 85 percent of the state used paper
ballots. Most were tabulated electronically – meaning an evidence trail
exists, if it has not been destroyed or fatally compromised. But we
have reason
to believe this destruction has already occurred in a number of Ohio
counties, rendering a full recount and audit impossible.

While the anomalies we have found in the Ohio
vote are deep and serious, an in-depth study now indicates shocking
parallels in New Mexico, which we will discuss in tomorrow's article.

The Bush-Cheney ‘do-everything’ strategy in
Ohio covered a very wide range of tactics, from disenfranchisement of
minority voters to discarding of ballots to tampered tabulators and
much more.

Taken as a whole, this compendium of error,
fraud, cover-up and contempt indicates that this was not a legitimate
election, and is not worthy of being certified by the Congress of the
United
States:

1. More than 106,000 Ohio ballots remain
uncounted. As certified by Blackwell, Ohio’s official results say
92,672 regular ballots were cast without indicating a choice for
president. This sum
grows to 106,000 ballots when uncounted provisional ballots are
included. There is no legal reason for not inspecting and counting each
of these ballots. This figure does not include thousands of people who
did not vote,
despite intending to do so in Ohio’s inner cities, due to a lack of
voting machines, having no available ballots, intimidation,
manipulation of registrations, denial of absentee ballots and other
means of depriving
American citizens of their rightful vote.

2. Most uncounted ballots come from regions
and precincts where Kerry was strongest. In Hamilton County, 4,515
ballots or 51.64 percent of the uncounted county total, came from
Cincinnati, where
Kerry won 67.98 percent to Bush’s 31.54 percent. In Cuyahoga County,
4,708 ballots or 44 percent of the county total came from Cleveland,
where Kerry won all 65 precincts. In Summit County, 2,650 ballots or
48.72
percent of the county total came from Akron, which Kerry won 68.75
percent to Bush’s 28.00 percent.

3. Of the 147,000 combined provisional and
absentee ballots counted by hand after Election Day, Kerry received
54.46 percent of the vote. In the 10 largest Ohio counties, Kerry’s
margin was 4.24
to 8.92 percent higher than in the certified results, which were
predominantly machine counted. As in New Mexico, where George W. Bush
carried every precinct whose votes were counted with electronic optical
scanning
machines, John Kerry's vote count was significantly lower among ballots
counted on Election Day using electronic tabulators.

4. Turnout inconsistencies reveal tens of
thousands of Kerry votes were not simply recorded. Systematic
mathematical scrutiny reveals that the certified results at the
statewide and
precinct-to-precinct level display key patterns against a backdrop of
implausible results. Most striking is a pattern where turnout
percentages (votes cast as a percentage of registered voters) in cities
won by Kerry
were 10 percentage points or more lower than in the regions won by
Bush, a virtually impossible scenario.

In Franklin County, where Columbus is
located, Kerry won 346 precincts to Bush’s 125. The median Kerry
precinct had 50.78 percent turnout, compared to 60.56 percent for Bush.
Kerry’s lower
numbers are due to local election officials assigning more voting
machines per capita to Republican-leaning suburbs than the
Democrat-leaning inner city – a political decision and likely Voting
Rights Act violation. If
Kerry-majority precincts in Columbus had a 60 percent turnout, as
recorded throughout the rest of the state, he would have netted an
additional 17,000 votes.

5. Many certified turnout results in key
regions throughout the state are simply not plausible, and all work to
the advantage of Bush. In southern Perry County, two precincts reported
turnouts of
124.4 and 124.0 percent of the registered voters. These impossible
turnouts were nonetheless officially certified as part of the final
recount by Blackwell. But in pro-Kerry Cleveland, there were certified
precinct
turnouts of 7.10, 13.15, 19.60, 21.01, 21.80, 24.72, 28.83 and 28.97
percents. Seven entire wards reported a turnout less than 50 percent.
But if the actual Cleveland turnout was 60 percent, as registered
statewide,
Kerry would have netted an additional 22,000 votes. Kerry is also
thought to have lost 7,000 votes in Toledo this way.

6. Due to computer flaws and vote shifting,
there were numerous reports across Ohio of extremely troublesome
electronic errors during the voting process and in the counting. In
Youngstown, there
were more than two-dozen Election Day reports of machines that switched
or shifted on-screen displays of a vote for Kerry to a vote for Bush.
In Cleveland, there were three precincts in which minor third-party
candidates
received 86, 92 and 98 percent of the vote respectively, an outcome
completely out of synch with the rest of the state (a similar thing
occurred during the contested election in Florida, 2000). This class of
error points
to more than machine malfunction, suggesting instead that votes are
being electronically shifted from one candidate to another in the
voting and counting stage. All reported errors favored Bush over Kerry.

7. In Miami County, two sets of results
were submitted to state officials. The second, which padded Bush's
margin, reported that 18,615 additional votes were counted, increasing
Bush’s total by
exactly 16,000 votes. Miami County’s turnout was up 20.86 percent from
2000, but only had experienced a population increase of 1.38 percent by
2004. Two Miami County precincts were certified with reported turnouts
of
98.55 and 94.27 percent. In one of the precincts this would have
required all but ten registered voters to have cast ballots. But an
independent investigation has already collected affidavits of more than
10 registered
voters that did not cast ballots on Nov. 2, indicating that Blackwell's
officially certified vote count is simply impossible, which once again
favoring Bush.

In Warren County, in southern Ohio, an
unexplained Homeland Security alert was cited by Republican election
board officials as a pretext for barring the media and independent
observers from the
vote count. In Warren and neighboring Butler and Clermont Counties,
Bush won by a margin of 132,685 votes. He beat Gore in these counties
in 2000 by 95,575 votes, meaning an implausible pickup of almost 40,000
votes.

But Bush’s numbers meant 13,566 people who
voted for C. Ellen Connally, the liberal Democratic candidate for Ohio
Supreme Court Chief Justice, also voted for Bush. In Butler Country,
Bush
officially was given 109,866 votes. But conservative GOP Chief Justice
Moyer was given only 68,407, a negative discrepancy of more than 40,000
votes. Meanwhile, Connally was credited with 61,559 votes to John
Kerry's
56,234. This would mean that while Bush vastly outpolled his Republican
counterpart running for the Supreme Court, African-American female
Democrat running for the Supreme Court on the Democratic side outpolled
Kerry. By
all accounts such an outcome is inconceivable. Again, it indicates a
very significant and likely fraudulent shifting of votes to Bush.

8. Democratic voters were apparently
targeted with provisional ballots. These ballots require voters to fill
out extensive forms at the poll. Under extraordinary rules established
by Blackwell
these ballots were set to be discarded if even minor errors were
committed. Poll watchers in Cleveland and Columbus have testified that
most provisional ballots were given to minority and young voters. The
same is true
with presumed liberal college and university students. In Athens, where
Ohio University is located, 8.59 percent of student ballots were
provisional. At Kenyon College and Oberlin College, liberal arts
institutions,
there were severe shortages of voting machines when compared with
nearby religious-affiliated schools. Students at Kenyon waited up to
eleven hours to vote. Provisional ballots were also required of mostly
African-American students at Wilberforce College.

9. Ohio's Election Day exit poll was more
credible than the certified result, according to intense statistical
analysis. In-depth studies by Prof. Ron Baiman of the University of
Illinois at
Chicago shows that Ohio's exit polls in Ohio and elsewhere were
virtually certain to be more accurate than the final vote count as
certified by Blackwell. Ohio's exit polls predicted a Kerry victory by
percentages that
exceeded their margin of error. Compared to the voter access, voting
technology and vote counting problems in Ohio, the exit polls were far
more systematic and reliable. Critics of the exit polls’ accuracy say
too many
Democrats were sampled, but a detailed analysis of that assertion shows
no credible evidence for it. The stark shift from exit polls favoring
Kerry to final results in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio all went in
Bush's
direction, and are, according to Baiman, a virtual impossibility, with
odds as high as 150 million to one against.

10. The Ohio recount wasn’t random or
comprehensive and may have involved serious illegalities. Under Ohio
law, 3 percent of the ballots in a precinct are examined by hand. If
the numbers match
what was counted on Election Day, then the rest of the ballots are
compiled electronically. In many districts, Republican Secretary of
State Blackwell chose the precincts to be counted in a partisan manner,
weighing the
choices toward precincts where there were no disputes while avoiding
those being contested. Moreover, there have been numerous confirmed
instances where employees of the private companies that manufactured
the voting
machines had access to the machines and the computer records before the
recount occurred. In at least two counties, technicians from Diebold
and Triad dismantled key parts of voting machines before they could be
subjected to audits for recount. In some counties, vendor companies
conducted the recount – not public election officials. At least one
county---Shelby---has admitted to discarding key data before the
recount could be
taken. In Greene County unrecounted ballots were left unguarded in an
unlocked building, rendering the recount moot.

These ten points are among the most serious
clouding the electoral outcome in Ohio, but are only part of a larger
pattern. Their correlation with similar evidence in New Mexico, Florida
and
elsewhere gives them added gravitas. Scores of sworn affidavits and the
on-going work of teams of attorneys, statisticians and other experts
have revealed far more points of contention and suspicion, many of
which we
will present in tomorrow's article.

The sources used for this report are
available at http://freepress.org. The statistical analysis was
primarily done by Richard Hayes Phillips, PhD. A transcript of his
deposition in the election
challenge lawsuit detailing these findings can be found at:
http://freepress.org/images/departments/Dep_Phillips.pdf. The exit poll
analysis was by Ron Baiman, PhD, and a transcript of the deposition
describing his
analysis can be found at:
http://freepress.org/images/departments/Dep_Baiman.pdf. Additional
material appears in court filings in Moss v. Bush and related legal
actions filed with the Ohio Supreme Court.

These flaws must be thoroughly investigated
before Congress ratifies the Electoral College. The legitimacy of the
presidency and American Democracy is at stake. In tomorrow's article we
will
outline more of the evidence leading up to Thursday's historic vote.

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